(Photo of Barack Obama by Peter Holderness/Medill News Service)
Weekly Angst: Saving the planet is taking a back seat to the financial crisis right now. But to many of us, climate change remains the top concern for the next president of the United States, because we’re running out of time to stop the catastrophic results of a warming planet. It’s getting so bad that Al Gore, a former vice president, is suggesting civil disobedience.
Unfortunately, when climate change does come up these days, it has morphed into talk about offshore drilling and achieving independence from foreign oil, which is the way John McCain has framed it. The maverick who championed climate change legislation with his buddy Joe Lieberman in 2003 and 2005 has, in this campaign, shifted from concern about greenhouse gases to concern about high gas prices and getting off foreign oil. That means American oil is just fine with him. In fact, the more the better.
The League of Conservation Voters, Sierra Club and Environment America, the three major environmental organizations that endorse candidates, all jumped on the Barack Obama bandwagon early on, because he so clearly will lead the nation to a better place on global warming. As Environment America said, McCain is not the right president to reverse 8 years of the anti-environment Bush Administration.
Talking points
Here are 10 top reasons why Obama is the better candidate on global warming:
1. Obama favors cutting greenhouse gases as much as scientists say we should. His goal is an 80% reduction (from 1990 levels) by 2050. He doesn’t try to second-guess science. McCain’s goal is 60%.
2. Obama has a much better voting record. On the League of Conservation Voters scorecard, Obama’s lifetime record is 86%. McCain’s is 24. During the last 2 years, McCain has missed every important environmental vote, including 2 on renewable energy where a yea vote from him could have made the difference. He deliberately missed all 8 tries to extend the renewable energy tax credits.
3. Obama favors an RES and subsidies for renewable energy. He has called for a renewable electricity standard of 25% by 2025 and for investing $150 billion in renewable energy. McCain opposes RES, as well as subsidies to alternative energies like solar and wind, preferring to let the market work unfettered. Though he seems to favor incentives for nuclear power.
4. Obama is much more cautious about nuclear power. He says it may need to be part of the mix, but safety and waste storage problems must be resolved first. McCain, on the other hand, makes nuclear power a major part of his energy portfolio, calling for 45 new nuclear plants by 2030, and 100 eventually.
5. Obama wants all credits in a cap-and-trade system to be auctioned. In other words, polluters must pay for their allowances. McCain says permits would eventually be auctioned, but should mostly be given free at first, and he favors polluters being able to bank or borrow credits based on the economy.
6. Obama wants to double the fuel efficiency of autos in 18 years. McCain, who missed the corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) vote of 2007, says he would enforce the new standard of 35 mpg by 2020 but isn’t looking to increase it. Obama voted for the CAFE bill.
7. Obama says offshore drilling will do little to help gasoline prices and was for the ban. He’s since softened his stance, saying he might accept some offshore drilling if it would help get other things he wants, like RES. McCain strongly favors drilling offshore, saying it will help solve the problems of high gas prices and dependence on foreign oil. After McCain announced this new position favoring offshore drilling, and became a cheerleader for the cause, campaign donations from oil and gas went up more than double, or by more than a million dollars.
8. Obama took a stand against a summer repeal of the gas tax, when McCain and Hillary Clinton called for one. Obama called it a gimmick that would not help lower prices.
9. Obama favors a windfall profits tax on big oil companies. He would like to see that money go to people who are struggling to pay for gas. McCain is against a windfall profits tax.
10. Obama picked Sen. Joe Biden as is running mate. Biden has an 83% lifetime score with LCV and proposed a bill in 1986 to deal with global warming. McCain picked Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who has expressed doubt about the human role in causing climate change, filed suit to de-list the polar bear as endangered, and favors drilling in ANWR.
For more on the candidates' environmental views, go to News21 Politics and the Environment, and click on Charging Up the Elections. News 21 is a summer project of Carnegie-Knight fellows at Northwestern University. (In the interest of full disclosure, I was one of the faculty members on the project.)
(Sources: League of Conservation Voters, Sierra Club, Environment America, barackobama.com, johnmccain.com, news21project.org, New York Times, salon.com)
6 comments:
What is the benefit of being “best” on what an overwhelming majority of scientists KNOW is a false assumption?
That FALSE ASSUMPTION will cost the world an estimated $45 TRILLION and will give us no more “benefit” than Kyoto. Of course, given that warming is actually a net benefit to the majority of all living things, we will pay $45 TRILLION in order to do HARM to all living things! How STUPID is THAT?
Of course, owing entirely to the incompetence, laziness, ignorance and bias of the propagandists within the so-called “profession” of so-called “journalism”, no politician, including McCain, dares to challenge the conventional “wisdom” of the so-called MSM!
sbvor,
Judging from the amount of times you post on here, I am sorry that you are devoting so much time to trying to refute the overwhelming body of scientific evidence for the need for reducing GHG emissions to combat global warming.
I realize you are just trying to create a smoke screen of ostensible dissent to what every rational person knows. But you should try and be more productive with your time.
I hate to break it to you, but Google search results with a few hits from biased, conservative blogs do not pass as legitimate evidence.
On the contrary, the Stern Review, an actual government report using scientific research as evidence, concludes :
"This Review has assessed a wide range of evidence on the impacts of climate change and on the economic costs, and has used a number of different techniques to assess costs and risks. From all of these perspectives, the evidence gathered by the Review leads to a simple conclusion: the benefits of strong and early action far outweigh the economic costs of not acting." (emphasis added)
Where is the refereed scientific research that refutes this finding by the Stern Review?
Bru,
1) Do you often confuse economic research with scientific research?
2) This economic “research” was predicated on false assumptions regarding Climate Change (in degree, cause and ability to micromanage).
Start here and work your way through all the links. There, you will find your purely political hysteria refuted by:
A) Directly cited, published peer reviewed science.
B) The insights of leading scientists, many of whom have left the purely political IPCC in disgust.
As a teaser, examine this peer reviewed science, published in this peer reviewed science journal, data from which are available in this file from this NOAA page. This is the chart I produced from that peer reviewed data. If you want to restore the “natural” and “normal” CO2 levels of this planet, burning all the hydrocarbons on the entire planet would not even begin to get us there! But, even if we DID get there, the NATURAL climate forcing factors would STILL reproduce another ice age equivalent to the Ordovician Ice Age (which was quite similar to the present Ice Age).
sbvor,
Your inability to coherently respond to my point is glaring.
I'll ask once again, where is the refereed scientific research or another authoritative source that refutes the finding of the Stern Review?
I can't believe you are still peddling debunked "lists" such as Sen. Inhofe's supposed "400 scientists". Several of these 400 either have asked to be taken off the list, have had positions misrepresented or taken out of context, are not climatologists or scientists dealing with climate in any way, or were speaking off the cuff and not making official scientific research statements. (Source).
The scientific article you referenced simply says that paleoclimate models of CO2 need to be slightly adjusted due to some effects of plants. It doesn't say anything about humanity's impact on global warming; that's not its focus.
It's time to stop clutching at straws and embrace reality.
Bru,
1) A study predicated on false assumptions is garbage in and garbage out. Again, START here and click through ALL the links to discover the FACTS as related through DIRECTLY cited peer reviewed science AND scientists who have served as IPCC Lead Authors and know EXACTLY how political, CORRUPT and DISHONEST the IPCC is.
2) The “faith” you place in your citation reveals your own lack of qualifications.
A) I got no further than this quote before I wrote it off as a waste of my time:
“I’m not certain a dozen on the list would qualify as ‘prominent scientists,’ and many of those, like Freeman Dyson — a theoretical physicist — have no expertise in climate science whatsoever.”
Climate Science is a VERY multi-disciplinary endeavor. Which scientists do you imagine do the calculations on the (very tiny) warming effect of CO2? Physicists!
Who do you imagine does the work on determining the history of the planet with respect to atmospheric CO2? Paleogeologists!
Who do you imagine does the temperature reconstructions based upon analysis of coral reefs? Marine Biologists!
Must I continue?
B) But, I pressed on anyway, only to find, in the very next paragraph that the author completely mischaracterized the words of Ray Kurzweil. I only glanced at the rest of the garbage.
C) Contrary to your LIE, your author mentions NOTHING about ANYBODY requesting to be removed from Inhofe’s list.
D) Rather, your citation is nothing more than the usual smear campaign always resorted to by those who do NOT have the science on their side (aka PROPAGANDISTS)! As pathetic smear jobs go, your citation was one of the worst I have ever read.
3) The data from GeoCarb III, available at NOAA, PROVES that CO2 is NOT a primary driver of climate change (as do ALL of the Ice Core Studies)! See my previous comment.
4) If you want a peek at what very well COULD be a primary driver of truly devastating climate change over the next several decades or centuries, one of our locals here in Steamboat Springs has provided some insight into that. Ever heard of the “Maunder Minimum”. You could be hearing a great deal more about it in the not too distant future.
Of course, the problem for your sort is that it is hard to mesh a global cooling agenda into the radical Marxist anti-Capitalist agenda of the typical Environmental Extremist.
Now, now. Getting all shrill and huffy isn't going to solve anything.
No one's disputing that there aren't other drivers of climate change than human GHG emissions. Of course there are. But the presence of one driver doesn't negate the presence of another. The world is a complex place, and your logic is so twisted it resembles a tumbleweed.
I didn't lie about people being asked to be removed from Inhofe's list. I didn't realize the article documenting those "skeptics" jumping Inhofe's sinking ship wasn't the one linked to in the article I cited. But here it is, along with others:
Inhofe 400 who asked to be taken off the list or whose views were misrepresented or skewed:
George Waldenberger
Gwyn Prins and Steve Rayner
Christopher L. Castro
"radical Marxist anti-Capitalist agenda of the typical Environmental Extremist"
No one swallows this kind of bile any more. Get over it.
And you still have not countered the Stern Review finding...
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